The Head of the Class
(See Cover) When the school bells rang this fall, they called more than 54 million young people -- better than one-fourth of the U.S. population -- to the pursuit of learning. This volcanic eruption of pupils --from the post-diaper toddlers and the blue-jeaned teen-agers to the bearded or button-down collegians -- dramatizes a remarkable phenomenon in U.S. life.
Sixty-five years ago, when the U.S. population stood at 76 million, a thin 6% of the nation's 17-year-olds graduated from high school, and only 4% of the college-age youths were in college. To day, with the U.S. population grown by nearly 40%, to 195 million, an impressive 71% of the 17-year-olds are getting their high school diplomas, and about 30% of the college-age population is in the classroom. To pay for all this, Americans are spending $42 billion this year, and to make education work, they are providing 125,000 schools, 100,000 administrators and 2,000,000 teachers.
In short, that was no anachronistic school bell that rang--that was the educational explosion, the sound of a roaring pursuit of learning that has never been matched either in quality or in numbers in U.S. history.
The Debate. While there is plenty of reason to be proud of the accomplishment, no one is satisfied. Neither the new generation nor the parents, nor the academicians for that matter, can quite grasp the totality of the revolution in U.S. education. The sheer numbers alone stun them. The task of deciding what a good education should be, and what ought to be taught, and when and to whom it ought to be taught--to say nothing of how education should be financed--poses tremendous problems and precipitates endless debate.
"A whole generation is being sacrificed!" complains Critic Paul Goodman, who is the current idol of campus rebels. "The schools have become a universal trap" in which "there is so much sitting in a box facing front, manipulating symbols at the direction of distant administrators." Yes, concedes Caltech President Lee A. DuBridge, "We are in trouble--deep trouble." But, he adds, it is not the fault of the schools. "We are expecting too much of our schools and too fast." Emphatically no, declares Admiral Hyman Rickover, the foremost gadfly in the groves of academe. "We have the slowest-moving school system in the civilized world. Precious school hours are wasted teaching children how to make fudge, twirl batons, drive cars, budget income, handle the telephone and catch fish."
Smashing Barriers. The one thing about which all educators are in agreement is that yesterday's education no longer suffices for today. The rate of technological change and the development of new information is so great that educators scarcely know what to make of it all, let alone how to get it taught; next week's scientific discovery can make last week's textbook obsolete. Even future vocational demands are unpredictable; not long after Los Angeles vocational schools developed a program to train keypunch operators, new machines came along to make the keypunch--and the operators--superfluous.
What U.S. schools need, then, is plenty of help. And teacher-turned-President Lyndon Johnson has galvanized Congress into doing something about it. In the past six months, Congress has smashed longstanding barriers and churned out the most significant series of education acts in the nation's history. As a consequence of this legislation and other bills now shaping up under federal auspices:
>> The nation's public schools and some parochial schoolchildren for the first time will get direct federal aid. About $775 million will go this year to finance improvement projects that the schools themselves develop.
>> College students will be able to get federal cash scholarships--instead of loans.
>> A National Teachers Corp. will provide a pool of traveling teachers to help big-city systems with their slum schools.
>> A network of regional educational research laboratories will go to work on stimulating ideas for new techniques in teaching, new concepts in school administration, new ideas in curriculums.
>> A vastly enlarged work-study program will enable 100,000 youths to stay in high school and college while they work part-time--with the Federal Government paying 90% of their wages.
>> A program will be launched to provide year-round preschool instruction and medical help for four-and five-year-olds; a similar project, designed to help "culturally deprived" high-schoolers prepare for college, will be organized on a summertime schedule.
>> A Job Corps, already in operation in 62 camps, will be expanded to give problem kids (chiefly high school dropouts) remedial instruction and vocational help.
Nerve Center. The responsibility for directing the biggest part of this unprecedented involvement in the education affairs of the country falls to the Department of Health, Education & Welfare, which is run by Secretary John Gardner, 53. A onetime psychology professor, Gardner was president of the Carnegie Corporation, an educational foundation that has distributed $347 million in grants since 1911; he left that post this year to take the job at HEW. The man who is directly in charge of administering the Federal Government's education programs is Gardner's Commissioner of Education, Francis Keppel, 49, a dark, slight (5 ft. 10 in., 152 lbs.) intense bolt of activity. In three short years in Washington, Keppel has changed the Office of Education from custodian of highly forgettable statistics to the nation's most energetic nerve center of academic ferment.
Keppel's powers spread throughout the entire fabric of American education. He is the czar of school integration programs, and can trigger a shut-off of federal funds to any educational project where racial discrimination exists. As Assistant Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare, he heads a committee that is studying the educational efforts of 43 federal agencies. He is chairman of a group that will propose more legislation on education next year, and he will have much to say about the direction of a new federal program for spreading scientific research grants among clamoring universities.
More remarkable than the extent of his administrative powers and responsibilities is Keppel's achievement, over a few brief years, in shaping Washington's concept of the federal partnership in education, and the success with which he has helped gather lawmakers, politicians and educators into a purposeful alliance that supports the federal role. The key to Keppel's success, says Columbia University Professor of Education Lawrence A. Cremin, is that he is "a man of intellect, but he's not arrogant. He is a political animal in the Aristotelian sense--a man who understands power and wants to use it for decent purposes." Adds Memphis School Superintendent E. C. Stimbert: Keppel is "a breath of fresh air in education."
Thrust toward Learning. The notion that any federal bureaucrat, no matter how enlightened, should wield any influence at all in education would have shocked America's early settlers. Schooling was mainly a parental responsibility, and its aim was to make sure that children learned to read the Bible. The Constitution was silent on the matter of education, and schooling became a function of state governments, which delegated power to towns and local school boards. Still, the main thrust of education was directed chiefly at achieving spiritual and moral purity. Fresh ideas, however, had begun to emerge. In Europe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared that education should strive to prepare a child for the world about him, not for the hereafter. Switzerland's Johann Pestalozzi urged schools to stop the "empty chattering of mere words" and help children to learn through observation, experimentation and reasoning. In the U.S., Horace Mann, contending that education could become "the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization," vastly strengthened the Massachusetts system of free public schools for the poor as well as the rich.
By 1900, 32 of the 45 states had compulsory-attendance laws.* Soon, educators came to accept John Dewey's dictum that education is not a preparation for life but a part of it, and that a school must "reproduce, within itself, the typical conditions of social life." "Progressive" education in the 1930s and '40s thus took the stress from textbooks and placed it on self-discipline and experimentation. The classrooms became more exciting, but soon educators were out-Deweying Dewey; permissiveness, and ultimately anti-intellectualism spoiled Dewey's dream. Thanks to reformers like former Harvard President James Conant (TIME cover, Sept. 14, 1959), schools began turning to the ideal of comprehensive education as well as cultural development for all children.
Except on rare occasions, the tradition of local control kept the Federal Government away from the schoolhouse. In 1862, the Morrill Act set up land-grant colleges, chiefly to promote agriculture and the mechanical arts. During World War I, the Government financed vocational training in the high schools. Then, after World War II, the Treasury financed the $14.5 billion G.I. Bill of Rights. Now, no longer was a high school education alone sufficient to meet the demands of a reawakened nation. College was the goal, and better preparation for it an absolute necessity.
Frank Keppel names four intellectual influences who contributed to the revolution in education during the past 15 years. "The first," he says, "is Robert Taft, who, I think, probably persuaded the American people that you could use federal tax money for primary and secondary schools without immediately ending in perdition. He himself proposed such bills; they never passed, but he got the thinking going. The second, not precisely like Mr. Taft, is Mr. Khrushchev, who scared the daylights out of us, scared us that the schools were not any good and that we had better compete. The third is Pope John, with the ecumenical movement, and the fourth is Lyndon Johnson. Can you think of a more unlikely batch?"
That unlikely batch, in fact, helped quiet fears that federal participation in education meant federal tyranny. "Words like 'regimentation' or 'control' are bugaboos of a controversy now past," says Yale's Kingman Brewster Jr. M.I.T. Chairman James Killian argues that federal support of new curriculum development has created "more diversity in our school systems, not less, more opportunities of choosing improved ways of teaching, not fewer."
The federal role, explains Frank Keppel, is "that of a junior partner in the firm in which the major stockholders are state, local and private educational agencies." In terms of money alone, he adds, the Government picks up only 13.6% of the nation's total school bill, hardly a controlling share.
Keppel sees the function of the Office of Education as that of a stimulator for improvement at the local school level, a leader in the search for the right goals in education. He contends that educators too often resist change; somehow, he says, they feel that "a voice for change is a voice against education." Partly for that reason, Keppel works hard to get businessmen, politicians, scientists and other thinkers involved in education's problems. "Education," he says, "is too important to be left solely to the educators."
Using the Money. Events so far, at any rate, have shown that most educators are only too eager to accept the new Government programs. The Elementary and Secondary Act gives school districts and the states virtually a free say on how they will use their federal funds. The uses will vary widely. Houston, for example, plans to put about $3,000,000 into 25 schools in poor neighborhoods. Pupils will get more individual instruction and go to museums and the opera; 5,000 parents will be enlisted in guidance programs; the correlation between the degree of a student's muscular coordination and the development of his reading skills will be studied. Sacramento School Superintendent Dr. F. Melvyn Lawson wants to concentrate on psychological and psychiatric services for disturbed children, hopes to find out "what's bugging problem youngsters and why they cannot tick." Arlington, Va., educators are considering a music center, a planetarium and a science day camp. Responding to a survey in the trade publication, Grade Teacher, Detroit Teacher Jean Curtiss declared: "Oh boy, I'd like to see to it that every child came to school decently clothed, especially with warm clothes" (part of the federal allotment can, in fact, be spent on clothing). Other instructors want to use their money for such aids as film strips, slide projectors, tape recorders, closed-circuit TV and copying machines.
Although not all details of the Higher Education Act have been worked out, the plan calls for allocating college scholarship funds to the states. Each college will then choose from among the regularly enrolled students in good standing those who are most in need of the help. The grants, which should be available in February, may run as high as $1,000, can be used for other college expenses as well as tuition.
As soon as the National Teacher Corps gets organized, school districts with concentrations of low-income families will be able to get help from the pool and use it any way they see fit. The roving teachers will probably form teams, so that classroom time can be used more effectively, or they may provide individual students with remedial work and counseling.
In addition to these new programs, federal school-construction projects continue to get special attention. U.S. funds this year are helping to build classrooms and laboratories at 460 colleges and universities, 360 public libraries and 26 community colleges and technical institutes.
Research Channels. The real potential in the Government's big push lies in the attempt, for the first time, to set up orderly ways to get new ideas flowing from fertile minds into local classrooms. The network for innovation will comprise 20 broadly based "national laboratories," nine research and development centers at major universities, and 2,000 local "supplementary service centers."
Out of such a network could well come revolutionary classroom concepts like the new math, which was developed under grants from the federally supported National Science Foundation. The new math is in use now in 40% of the nation's public grade schools despite increasing complaints from bewildered parents, who wonder whether teaching arithmetic by "sets" can help a child add up a grocery bill. One of the new-math textbooks poses a problem in subtraction this way: "Take the set of animals which is the inter section of the set of lizards with the set of sick animals out of the cage." But the old way of saying that, insists one critic, Caltech Physicist Richard Feynman, was much better. This subtraction really boils down to: "Take the sick lizards out of the cage."
Presumably, the regional research laboratories will devote their energies to the need for getting the sick lizards out of pedagogy. The prototype of the laboratories idea is the M.I.T.-initiated Educational Services, Inc., supported by private foundations but sustained largely by $20 million in federal grants. There, 350 faculty members from 200 colleges and universities have pitched into studies that range from the best way to teach semiconductor physics to development of a course on "Man." The "Man" study will take some time to evolve; it will try to find the answers to three questions: "What is human about human beings?" "How did they get that way?" "How can they be made more so?"
A new laboratory in New York City, operated chiefly by eight area universities, is analyzing successful slum kids to see how they overcame severe handicaps, finding ways to get parents involved in school activities, exploring educational parks. "In city slums, public schools are often just rotting cadavers," says the laboratory's planning chairman, Dr. Robert A. Dentler. "We must find some answers."
Most of the R. & D. centers will concentrate on less sweeping topics. In a Pittsburgh elementary school, University of Pittsburgh researchers roll piles of "programmed" textbooks into a huge hall, where children pick them up, work in silence at their own pace. An eight-year-old might be working on fifth-grade math, second-grade English, third-grade science. At Harvard, experts are studying the psychological factors that can inhibit a deprived child's ability to learn. The University of Oregon is trying to find out just how much influence teachers have in running their schools.
At the same time, the Office of Education is expanding its own research program. Only four years ago, 80% of such research was handled by schools of education whose investigators too often dwelt on such esoteric questions as whether 24 or 26 pupils were the best size for an elementary class. Today, 60% of the research is performed by experts outside education. Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Stanley Diamond, for example, are studying the culture patterns of slum schools. New York Composer Vittorio Giannini is developing a new music curriculum. Biographer Mark Schorer is looking for new techniques in teaching literature. Nobel Laureate William Shockley is exploring computer-programmed instruction. Keppel's office has ordered 28 studies alone on a single question: How do first-graders learn to read?
Federally supported scientific research at U.S. universities is another area of major impact on education. Heretofore, $2 billion a year in Government research grants--two-thirds of the total research money spent by U.S. colleges and universities--served mainly to bolster the schools that were already at the top. Half of all such grants, in fact, has been going to only 20 universities.* Now President Johnson has decided to spread the treasure around. He recently directed all federal agencies to look for new deserving schools that can use the grants as a means of developing facilities and faculties. "We want to find excellence and build it up wherever it is found," says the President, "so that creative centers of excellence may grow in every part of the nation."
Integration. While research looks to education's future, there is still the troublesome problem of school integration. With the 1964 Civil Rights Act as his club, Keppel issued "guidelines" last spring ordering integration at the rate of four grades a year for the next three years; in the absence of such plans, schools could adapt "freedom of choice" plans, by which Negroes would be permitted to enter any school that could accommodate them. Any school system that failed to develop acceptable plans, he said, would lose its claim to federal funds. To ease the pain, Keppel sent his men into Dixie to talk to school administrators. He himself discussed ways and means at innumerable conferences, spent countless hours on long-distance telephone lines to persuade the reluctant. By summertime this year, Keppel had hopes that there would be a tenfold increase in the number of Negro children attending integrated classes.
No such luck. Last week, after a head count, Keppel found that only 217,000 Negro students--7.5% of school-age Negroes--had entered predominantly white schools in the South, an increase of only three times that of last year. Instead of compliance, much of the South had once again played the game of tokenism or outright defiance.
Even more difficult to deal with is racial imbalance in Northern schools. Right now, Chicago is the big headache. Its school system is a mess. After investigating complaints by civil rights groups that some Chicago schools are maintaining segregationist practices, Keppel shut off about $30 million in federal aid. As it happened, the Commissioner moved too precipitously; technically, he was not authorized to act independently on such matters. Chicago authorities did agree to change some practices and re-examine others, and so the money was released. But Keppel himself was hauled into the White House for a lecture from Lyndon Johnson.
From Montrose to Washington. Such setbacks do not deter the single-minded devotion to the job that is an essential part of Frank Keppel's character. The youngest of five brothers,* he grew up in Montrose, N.Y., a country town 43 miles north of Manhattan. His father Frederick was the sort of man, recalls one relative, "who loved to think big thoughts while the roof was leaking." He was a Columbia College dean and an Assistant Secretary of War in World War I. From 1922 to 1941, Frederick Keppel was a self-styled "philanthropoid--a man who gave other people's money away." He, like Secretary Gardner, was president of the Carnegie Corporation.
Keppel sent his first four sons to Exeter. Frank went to Groton--a fact that he sometimes pencils out of official biographies because he thinks that it sounds too aristocratic to the ears of public-school men. At Harvard later, he managed mostly B's and a few C's, earned his B.A. in 1938. Roommate Donald Straus, now president of the American Arbitration Association, recalls that Keppel was "an early egghead," who could have racked up A's, but who chose instead to throw his energy into becoming a "campus executive." He did, in fact, become president of the Harvard Student Council in his senior year.
After a brief try at sculpting--a pursuit that he has since given up altogether--Keppel returned to Harvard, at President Conant's behest, to become an assistant freshman dean. He left Cambridge once again during World War II, served with the Joint Army-Navy Committee on Welfare and Recreation, helped draft plans for the G.I. Bill. At war's end, Keppel was back at Harvard, and at 32 was appointed by Conant to be dean of the foundering School of Education. It was a daring move. Not only did Keppel lack a graduate degree; he had never even taken a course in education, and Conant wondered aloud "how he would wash with the trade."
Keppel washed well enough, succeeded in getting faculty members from other disciplines into the education school, set up joint professorships on the theory that knowledge in specific fields is vital to the teaching of teachers. Says Presidential Assistant McGeorge Bundy, who was dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences: "Keppel won the respect of his faculty and my snobbish faculty, who tended to scoff at deans of education. He is a man who has grown on every job he's had--and left each a bigger job than it was." In 1962, John Kennedy invited Keppel to take on the Commissioner's job. In their first informal chat, Jack asked: "Weren't you in my brother Joe's class?" "Yes," replied Keppel. "Didn't you run against Joe for some office?" "Yes, for class marshal." "And didn't Joe beat you?" "Yes."
Recalls Keppel today: "Those Kennedys never forget an election."
Incredible Secretaries. In three years as Education Commissioner, Keppel has knocked the old pedagogical stuffiness out of the Office of Education; for one thing, he has gotten the dozens of Ph.D.s there to quit calling each other "Doctor." Recently he overheard a staffer apologizing for never having gone to college. Keppel butted in with: "What the hell difference does that make?"
Keppel regularly runs through a nonstop, eleven-hour working day, conferring with the President or with HEW Secretary Gardner, calling weekend staff meetings, visiting schools, addressing meetings of the Chamber of Commerce or the United Jewish Appeal, or just about any interested group that shows a willingness to discuss the nation's education programs. He is for ever torn between the desire to proselytize and the need to be at his desk. "When a Congressman calls," he says, "I want to be there."
If the pressures of office ever do get to him, Keppel confides it only to his trim, sprightly wife Deedie (for Edith). The two live alone in a rented brick house in Georgetown; one daughter, Tracy, 23, who attended Bennington College and Boston University--but never graduated--is married, and a second, Susan, 18, is a freshman at Centenary College in Shreveport, La. "I love hearing about Frank's job," Deedie says. "I'm about the only person he can blow his stack with. Frank is just like his father. He leaves the cellar flooded and flies off to South America. The only thing he does around here each year is to sign his income-tax form." Even when traveling, says she, Keppel would be "absolutely lost without incredibly good secretaries who nursemaid him to death, give him money and notes to tell him where he is going."
National Testing. Keppel worries about where education in the U.S. is going. He contends that no one even knows where it is now--and that "what we don't know about education can hurt us." For that reason, he advocates a system of national testing that can supply an objective assessment of the state of the schools.
At Keppel's suggestion, the Carnegie Corporation is financing the preparation of tests that will measure achievement in reading, language arts, math, social studies, fine arts, vocational education and citizenship. Some tests will be tried out in public schools this winter. The tests have already become controversial --and widely misunderstood. Keppel's plan is not aimed at examining every U.S. schoolchild exhaustively and pitting the kids against one another. Tests would be given only to a relatively few children on a sample basis. No one child would take a whole battery of tests, and no teacher could profitably direct his teaching toward the questions.
One committee that is developing such tests is headed by Ralph W. Tyler, director of California's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He claims that tests are needed because "personal views, distorted reports and journalistic impressions are now the only sources of public opinion, and the schools are frequently attacked and frequently defended without having evidence to support either claim." His committee wants to give the tests to four age levels: 9, 13, 17 and, for comparison, to some adults.
A small-scale version of similar tests in 1960 produced some surprising facts. Among high school seniors, 15% saw nothing wrong with couldn't hardly: 26% said like he should: 17% saw no need to capitalize british: 36% wanted to stick an apostrophe somewhere in the possessive its: more than 50% could not spell breathe; 83% could not explain double jeopardy; 88% did not know what an indictment was; 86% failed to understand that the year A.D. 1002 came in the 11th century; and on a multiple-choice question, 24% could not select the first words of the national anthem.
Further testing can help educators determine just what else it is that U.S. schools are doing badly or not doing at all, and it is Keppel's hope that after enough information has been gathered and analyzed, positive steps can be taken to elevate the overall quality of education.
Visions of New Ventures. Once that is achieved, the American school system can enjoy the prospect of yet newer ventures into learning. Francis Ianni, Keppel's research chief, envisions new skills in computerization as the next big step. "We can look for improvement even in the way kids do homework," says Ianni. "In each home could be a carrel with a controlled environment complete with the benefits of programmed instruction. Encyclopedias at home would not be needed, for if a child needed research materials he might be able to call for information to a central source for standard reference materials. A printout device, a TV receiver, or microfilm would give him his information." Ianni speculates that the school as most people know it today may not even exist in the future. "Instead, we could have educational parks that would have a total program from preschool through adult education. A park will be based on the same idea as a supermarket, with all educational resources in one place. There will be mobile classrooms, movable walls, television. All computer needs would be served by one central bank of computers."
To many parents, Ianni's visions sound a little too dehumanized for comfort; yet, they may well come true. Frank Keppel himself states the case for the future in more recognizable terms. Speaking of his daughter's two-year-old son, Keppel says: "I think my grandson's generation will be able to handle mathematics and the basic ideas that govern the beauty and the reality of science far more effectively than I. He will read faster and remember more than I. He will have learned far more of other lands and other peoples. The intellectual isolation of my youth will turn, I hope, into the exploration of his mind and his career. He will be better able to change from one kind of work to another during his lifetime than I, for the changes in our society and in our educational system will mean that he will have to have a better basic edu cation, and therefore a better ability to apply himself to new jobs and new ways of life. Stability for him will be intellectual change."
And that, surely, marks Frank Keppel as something of an optimist, which is what a good educator must be.
* Today only Mississippi and South Carolina do not have compulsory-attendance laws.
* The top ten and their federal grants last
year: University of California, $64 million;
M.I.T., $30 million; Columbia, $28 million;
Harvard, $27 million; Stanford, $23 million;
Michigan, $21 million; Chicago, $20 million;
Illinois, $20 million; Wisconsin, $19 million; Minnesota, $17 million.
* Paul, 59, is an accountant in Maryland; Charles, 56, a troubleshooter for the Rockefeller brothers; David, 54, an oil geologist in Coral Gables, Fla.; and Gordon, 52, a physician at the University of Delaware.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.